1- Accused of two murders at just 18, he was allegedly a hitman. In 2006, he escaped from his cell in the city of Durrës.

2- Convicted of cocaine smuggling, he was placed in a prison south of Milan. In 2011, he escaped from prison along with two other inmates convicted of murder.

3- He was sentenced to an armed robbery in Belgium and placed in the Merksplas Prison near the city of Antwerp. Just two months later, he managed to escape from this prison as well.

4- In June 2014, police in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, seized 278 kilograms of cocaine in an operation named "Balkan," where he was caught. After spending five years in the Guayaquil and Cotopaxi prisons, he was placed under house arrest due to his lupus condition, was released, and was banned from leaving Ecuador. He later escaped again and vanished.

His name: Dritan Rexhepi.

An Albanian, known as the "King of Fugitives," he was subject to an Interpol Red Notice for "intentional homicide," "drug trafficking," "kidnapping," and "deprivation of liberty."

So, where did an international criminal, legendary in the underworld for his cocaine shipments and capable of escaping from prisons in different countries four times, flee to?

To Beylikdüzü!

As the poet Joseph Brodsky said, "There are crimes worse than burning books. One of them is not reading them." If we know how crime has become normalized in these lands today, the books describing the hell we live in also play a significant role. Timur Soykan's new book, "The Baron Invasion" (Kırmızı Kedi Publishing), confronts us with how and with whom we live.

I read the book's foreword: "With the Wealth Amnesty and cheap Turkish citizenship campaigns, the AKP government invited the world's dirty money and its filthy owners. Political Islamists, who ban festivals because 'alcohol is consumed,' have revitalized systems of profit and corruption with money from heroin, cocaine, arms smuggling, and human trafficking. In a country swarmed by oligarchs, oil companies, rich and dirty officials from poor countries, dark capitalists, and the world mafia, 'national and local' politicians and bureaucrats were opening the doors to great wealth."

Dritan Rexhepi, whose story I summarized at the beginning, was one of the key players in this vast filth. In 2023, Rexhepi was caught in his mansion inside a luxury compound in Istanbul's Beylikdüzü, having entered Turkey with a Colombian passport issued in the name of Benjamin Omar Perez Garcia.

Wasn't it a significant security lapse that one of the world's most important drug traffickers wasn't caught at the airport?

Moreover, the unavoidable question was this:

Shouldn't it be revealed who he was connected to in Turkey and who protected him? After all, leaders of major criminal organizations wouldn't go to a country without trusted connections or the assurance of powerful figures in the state to protect them.

Who are they?